Book Image

The Data Wrangling Workshop - Second Edition

By : Brian Lipp, Shubhadeep Roychowdhury, Dr. Tirthajyoti Sarkar
Book Image

The Data Wrangling Workshop - Second Edition

By: Brian Lipp, Shubhadeep Roychowdhury, Dr. Tirthajyoti Sarkar

Overview of this book

While a huge amount of data is readily available to us, it is not useful in its raw form. For data to be meaningful, it must be curated and refined. If you’re a beginner, then The Data Wrangling Workshop will help to break down the process for you. You’ll start with the basics and build your knowledge, progressing from the core aspects behind data wrangling, to using the most popular tools and techniques. This book starts by showing you how to work with data structures using Python. Through examples and activities, you’ll understand why you should stay away from traditional methods of data cleaning used in other languages and take advantage of the specialized pre-built routines in Python. Later, you’ll learn how to use the same Python backend to extract and transform data from an array of sources, including the internet, large database vaults, and Excel financial tables. To help you prepare for more challenging scenarios, the book teaches you how to handle missing or incorrect data, and reformat it based on the requirements from your downstream analytics tool. By the end of this book, you will have developed a solid understanding of how to perform data wrangling with Python, and learned several techniques and best practices to extract, clean, transform, and format your data efficiently, from a diverse array of sources.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
Preface

Statistics and Visualization with NumPy and Pandas

One of the great advantages of using libraries such as NumPy and pandas is that a plethora of built-in statistical and visualization methods are available, for which we don't have to search for and write new code. Furthermore, most of these subroutines are written using C or Fortran code (and pre-compiled), making them extremely fast to execute.

Refresher on Basic Descriptive Statistics

For any data wrangling task, it is quite useful to extract basic descriptive statistics, which should describe the data in ways such as the mean, median, and mode and create some simple visualizations or plots. These plots are often the first step in identifying fundamental patterns as well as oddities (if present) in the data. In any statistical analysis, descriptive statistics is the first step, followed by inferential statistics, which tries to infer the underlying distribution or process that the data might have been generated from. You...